Tag: software

HyperCard Lives – Sort of

I am guessing most readers have no idea what HyperCard is (actually was). For many of us, HyperCard was the beginning of many things. It was the beginning of hypermedia and multimedia authoring. It was often the beginning of scripting. HyperCard was very powerful. Perhaps you have heard of the graphics-intensive game Myst – originally a hypercard project created by the Miller brothers. I created projects in HyperCard I have been unable to duplicate as I have moved to other languages and delivery systems.

One of our first student projects consisted of individual images created by young students in KidPix. We extracted the audio, pasted the image on Hypercard cards and embedded the audio. I wrote a simple script attached to each card that moved the viewer on to the next card after a specified delay allowing the audio to be played. As far as I kow, it was an automated slide show that predated KidPix slideshow and any other program of that type. I still remember the first time we showed the student work at a parents’ night. We ran it on the largest TV monitor we could find. None of the adults had seen such a thing before.

I have heard rumors for years that HyperCard was going to make a comeback. It really never has. However, a new online app (tilestack) allows the creation of Hypercard-like stacks. I have created a small stack with their system to offer a simple example. TileStack is such a close relative of hypercard you can upload old hypercard stacks and it will convert them.

If you are not familiar with HyperCard, tilestack operates something like HyperStudio (now back in production via MacKiev) or perhaps products from eZedia (e.g., QTI). There have always been features I missed. For example, HyperCard functioned based on the selection of elements (buttons, fields, etc.), but also made available a powerful scripting language. I think I threw away the collection of manuals on hypertalk the last time I made room in my bookcase.

I wonder how I would do that. I have old stacks on 3.5 disks. I may have to fire up an old machine just to give the conversion program a try.

TileStack is under development. Many of the commands exist, but have “yet to be implemented”. I am not certain if you can try this out at this time. I read about the venture and put my name on the waiting list. I was notified by email that I had access. It appears the developers have big plans and many features are still in the works. I hope this venture makes it and people give it a try. Hypercard deserves a better fate than to fade into oblivion under piles of paper in one of my file cabinets on disks that no computer can now read.

BTW – Ketchikan is spelled correctly. I am not certain why it shows as a spelling error.

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1001

Saturday at the office. Cindy is out of town. Time for a “project”.

This morning while browsing LifeHacker, I read a description of a flickr tool called 1001. 1001 is a Mac only application that performs several tasks in conjunction with flickr. The one task that seemed kind of interesting was the monitoring of flickr to identify new uploads fitting user defined characteristics. This capability seemed like it might have possible classroom implications so I thought I would give it a try.

I created three streams – democrats (today is primary day in S. Carolina), North Dakota (just to see if anything is happening), and trld (Cindy is presently attending a conference titled Teaching, Reading and Learning Difficulties). I then entered tags associated with each stream (e.g., democrats – obama, clinton, edwards). Every 15 minutes (the setting I am using), 1001 scans flickr for new images relevant to my streams. See image below for the images/links from the democrats stream located in a little over an hour.

dems101.jpg

There must be some interesting things you could do with this tool in a classroom setting. Wouldn’t it be cool to leave the 1001 tool open on an interactive whote board. The most obvious application would be to set up streams associated with topics being discussed (especially if the topic is associated with an active issue) and see what pops up. I wonder if frequency of flickr images predicts election outcomes?

BTW – I know you are curious about the North Dakota stream. Did the 12 people in North Dakota with digital cameras take any pictures today? Absolutely – there were several very nice images. 😉

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WordPress Tutorial

Learning to operate open source software can sometimes be difficult because the software may not come with tutorials and you can’t always run to Barnes and Noble (Borders, Chapters, etc.) to buy a manual.

Here is a useful WordPress tutorial (the blog software I am using) you may find helpful. The first segment explains a unique method of installation that probably will not apply to your situation, but the other segments (see tabs across top of the page) are informative.

The tutorials are based on an educational context (provided by Henrico tech staff) so the application scenarios that form the basis for the tutorials are relevant.

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AERA 2007

We spent the last week in Chicago and in the journey getting from here to there and back. The event was the American Educational Research Association convention (2007). The one presentation I attended that may be of interest to those who read this blog concerned the evaluation of math and reading software I just described last week. A presenter from Mathematica and a discussant from Stanford considered the results of the first phase of the study. Here are a couple of comments that I found helpful.

Even though the study involved many schools, teachers, and students, treating school and teacher as units of analysis required, based on a power analysis, that the researchers expect an effect size of .15 to regard an effect as significant. In this situation, it was not possible to evaluate the impact of the 16 individual instructional packages that were used and the overall effect of reading or math software did not achieve statistical significance.

Based on tracking functions present in some of the software programs, the researchers estimated that use of the software replaced approximately 10% of traditional instruction. The discussant noted that for approximately $25 per seat (the average cost of the software) it might be argued that 10% of teacher time was freed to attend to the needs of individual students. This “spin” on the results was kind of interesting and at first I thought this to be a positive statement and quite optimistic given the very guarded approach taken by the researchers. However, while potentially true, it would also seem that this flexible time must not have been used productively or achievement gains would have been generated.

The data from the second phase of the study is still under review. The second phase will allow a comment on individual software packages.

Representatives from a couple of software companies were in the audience and noted that the software was implemented with the minimal amount of technical support and inservice preparation. The presenters accepted this description, but countered that this was the level of support that schools normally purchased.

The presenters were careful to stay away from speculating how the results of the research would be interpreted by politicians and policy analysts. The presenters argued that the results could be spun in different ways.

We did have the opportunity for a little recreation. The Sunday before the conference we were able to watch the White Sox and Twins. It was cold, but Santana was pitching for Minnesota and we are becoming big Twins fans. Twins won.

Baseball field

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Blogger.com Access Control

I picked this info up from David Warlick.

Like many bloggers I started blogging years ago using blogger.com. At first I used their site and then I purchased the pro version so I could serve blog content from my own server. Eventually, I moved on to software that was more powerful.

Blogger.com remains an extremely popular choice. Now, Blogger.com has been upgraded and some of the changes may make the service of greater interest to educators. One of the basic concerns has been that students may reveal information that could put them at risk. Blogger.com offers some new security options. It is possible to limit access to those designated within a set of email addresses. If you want to make the effort, the group that can access a blog can be carefully controlled.

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YEP

I am not a big fan of pdfs, but more and more I find myself collecting and reading from them. What has changed for me is the availability through my university library of a wide range of research journals in this format. Even when I have the journal in my office, I often download the pdf so that I can review specific research articles on my computer while I am writing.

If you are a Mac user (10.4 or later), there is a great product for organizing and searching your pdf collection. The product is called YEP (no idea what the name means).

YEP Screen

YEP is a document management system. The program stores what you import as individual files within a YEP folder in your “Documents” folder, but allows you to tag files and to search in multiple ways. An interesting suggestion was to use the print to pdf option to save many categories of material. For example, anything that can be printed from a web browser can be saved to this document management system.

The present version of YEP is free, but the developers say that further versions will cost a small amount to support their development efforts.

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The World of Educational Software is Flat

OK – my title is a derivative. In his book (by a similar name), Tom Friedman describes when he discovered the world was flat. I think this conference represents the time point at which I realize the world of educational software is flat. Now I understand that MacKiev is not a company located somewhere in Idaho. Now I understand that the “international types” do not all attend NECC to learn what folks in the U.S. are doing.

The person who described the feature of KidPix that allows podcasting was a software engineer from the Ukraine (very cool – more on that later – by the way this is MacKiev). The woman showing the best document camera I have seen (Wolf Vision) was from Austria. EducationCity is from England (I have this strange image of these electrons running through a cable across the Atlantic. One electron with an angry look on his face turns to the other and says – “North Dakota, again?”)

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